June 13, 2014 • 42 mins
Science fiction takes us tens of thousands of years into the future but sometimes imagines the range of human physical appearance will be about the same. Will humans look different in the future? Will we be 15 feet tall, or have heads like the grey aliens?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says that face,
that face, that lovable face. It melts my Swedish heart.
(00:21):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Focab, and I'm Joe McCormick.
And I'm not supposed to be here for this episode.
I was on vacation, but you guys actually decided to
wait for me and let me talk about about human
appearances changing over time, and it's so exciting to be well,
we knew we were going to have to talk about
what humans would look like in the future, and Jonathan,
(00:44):
I think you are what humans are going to look
like in the future. So sorry for all of humanity.
We couldn't really do it without you. I appreciate that. No,
I mean the more I've read into your notes and
read the references and everything you guys had had really
put together, I was really excited to hear this because
this is pretty fascinating stuff. Oh yeah, and this is
(01:05):
kind of part of our series. This originated as part
of our series on what we don't see enough of
in science fiction, right, though you do see some of this.
But yeah, if you project forward a little bit in
science fiction, look a few thousand years into the future.
Part of the problem is you've got aliens who look
alien and then unless it's Star Trek, in which case
(01:27):
they look human, right or yeah, yeah, there's some sort
of ridge somewhere on their face. And you've got humans
who look exactly like humans look whenever the movie was made.
Although you know, Patrick Stewart is captain Jean Loup Picard,
you know what, you might be onto something about they
look the future looks like me. He needs a goateee
but yeah, yeah, and he needs to put on a
(01:49):
few pounds. But other than that, yeah, no, we wanted
to I'm okay with it now, we we we we
really wanted to take a look at what will I mean,
what what's the prevailing thought about what human appearance is
going to be? And as it turns out, it's a
very tricky thing to talk about for multiple reasons. Well,
of course you can't really predict, right, I mean, it's
(02:11):
one of those things where there's not a a clear
projection that will be controlled by human behavior. Right, It's
like kind of a it's kind of willy nilly, and
it's kind of random. Right, there's not like a a
simulation we can pull up where we just have a
slider and we said, all right, let's just slide it
forward fifty years. Oh, that's what we're gonna look like arms. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
(02:35):
So we wanted to kind of talk about some of
the scholarship behind this and the thoughts behind this, and
really kind of dive into this topic and talk about
some of the possibilities. Right. So, just last year, there
was actually a funny news story and then a lot
of back and forth between people in the media and
the scientific community about this one particular article that Forbes published, Right,
(02:59):
it went pretty viral. They published this this tech blog
and or article and or content piece. I'm not sure
exactly what, right um, it was called how the human
Face Might look in a hundred thousand years. So this
was June of last year. This was junect and h
in it, Forbes staffer Parmi Olsen reported on work that
(03:21):
had been done by by this digital artist named Nicola
Lamb in collaboration with a computational genomist named Dr Alan Quan.
I didn't even know computational genomist was a was a
thing me neither. Pretty awesome, congratulations to that guy. And
so in their work they speculated on what the face
might look like in twenty thousand, sixty and a hundred
(03:43):
thousand years. Okay, So so what did they come up with. Well,
you guys might have seen a picture of this somewhere.
It basically the furthest view out was the sort of
anime character looking thing, right, okay, gigantic eyes, gigantic eyes,
kind of weird big forehead. Uh and you're not so
far sunny like me. Now, My eyes are not gigantic.
(04:05):
I do have the weird big forehead though, That's okay.
So their predictions fall into into a few broad categories. Okay.
They suggested that the forehead will get longer and wider
to accommodate a larger brain. We'll talk more about this
way at the end of the podcast. Um that the
eyes will get larger approaching and I quote unnerving lye large.
This is what we call Disney princess large. As as
(04:27):
we adapt to dimmer off earth environments and as we
become more innocent, right. Um that our nostrils will get
larger and our hair denser to help with breathing and
heat retention off world. That way, I hope the timeline
on this is really accelerated because that hair density thing
is very very pertinent to me. Um. That our skin
(04:50):
will get darker to help combat UV radiation outside of
Earth's ozone, That we'll ditch wearable tech for subtle implants um.
And that perhaps most importantly, genetic manipulation will render natural
evolution moot um, likely resulting in increasingly normal human features
with an emphasis on on symmetry and the golden ratio
(05:13):
and that kind of ideal of human and normal normal
and ideal there being in quotation really heavy quotation marks
in case you can't tell my sarcasm voice, which I
am told sometimes sounds a lot like my normal. Well yeah,
now the exactly because normal, I mean, who defines what
normal is in this case and this they're specifically looking
(05:35):
at these these uh ideals which have been held up
as ideals only by certain types certain cultures. Um. So yeah,
you gotta take that with a grain of salt. Yeah.
Another thing to note is that they're not suggesting that
this is how humans will grow to look because of say,
natural selection, they're saying that this is how we will
(05:55):
basically decide will engineer, We will choose features and you know,
so Gattica ask everyone will end up looking like Jude Law.
Well I'm okay with that too actually, but the uh
pretty man. But anyway, the the what I was going
to go into here is that, uh, if some of
this kind of makes sense from sort of a top
(06:18):
level approach, right, the idea that if we are to
go colonize other planets, there will likely be uh situations
there that will be different enough from what we have
here at Earth that we would need some form of
adaptation to be able to thrive on said planet. And
so while it might not be uh efficacious for us
(06:41):
to wait for evolution to take hold so that whichever
humans survive that initial colonization end up producing generation upon
generation upon generation. Uh you know, multiply that out ten
thousand times. Do you get to a group of human
beings or what used to be human beings who are
ideally suited for that planet. It may it's more sense
that we would be taking an approach where we're making
(07:03):
those choices consciously. Well, I mean, these days, in the
ideal scenario, we do all we can to prevent natural
selection from happening to humans frequently. Yeah, I had a joke,
but I'm going to leave it on this case. You cat,
you can thank me later, all right. So an observation
I had about their predictions is that if you just
(07:26):
take them as like, these are some kind of fun,
interesting guesses, I think they are interesting total to go with.
But there's sort of the question of, like, at what
level are these being pitched. Are they just saying, here
are some interesting suggestions, or are they saying we've got
a pretty good idea what humans are going to look like?
And I think that exact distinction was embodied in a
(07:48):
lot of the responses. Oh yeah, because there is this
whole flurry of response on the internet. Do you, guys,
do you believe that the Internet took something way more
seriously than they perhaps should have and blew it out
of proportion. Um. I'm sorry, that's my sarcasm voice is
strong today. UM. And I do want to point out
here that that Nicolae Lamb is the guy who created
that average Barbie doll that also went viral in um.
(08:12):
If you remember the side by side photos of a
of a of a store bought Barbie with a barbie
who is shaped more or less like a human person.
Um uh, yeah, he's that guy. He also is behind
the Lammily doll line, which he kicks started in two
to work towards producing realistic shaped dolls for kids. Because Okay,
a thing to keep in mind about Lamb's work is
(08:34):
that he's really savvy about producing stuff that will capture
the public's imagination and click throughs. So, in other words,
like this could be something where uh he imagines a
scenario and then and then frames it in such a
way that it's compelling enough for people to look at,
participate in discussion about, but doesn't necessarily indicate any kind
(08:56):
of expertise necessarily that or or scholarship that went into
the the ultimate design or or or guess I think
very much that Um that you know that that he
and the other fellow Quan were trying to make an
interesting thing, perhaps more so than an extraordinarily accurate future prediction. Well,
(09:18):
and and one other thing I would point out, and
some of the other discussions we're going to to chat
about will sort of fall into this as well, is
that while we could go the engineering route to try
and take tackle some of these these issues. Another thing
we could try, besides, you know, altering ourselves, is altering
(09:38):
the environment we're going into, and therefore you wouldn't have
the environmental requirement to adapt. We could adapt the environment,
which is pretty much what humans have been doing for
the last couple hundred years. Yeah. Typically we don't biologically
adapt to our environments anymore. We adapt the environments, or
we technologically adapt, right, right, right, You don't need crazy
anime eyes if you have lamp, right right, that's a
(10:02):
good point a Pitch Dark couldn't have, or is it
pitch black? Pitch Black? That Pitch Black couldn't happen because
because you know, that's a that's actually a good Vin
Diesel movie, and you're gonna destroy the few good I'm
not going to take Pitch Black away from us, all right.
I think the thinking is that huge anime eyes would
(10:22):
help protect the environment because you wouldn't need to use
as much energy on lamps or in situations where energy
is scarce. I'm pretty sure that our energy problem, I
don't know, I'm pretty sure, and I know you're you're
you're making a joke, but I have to be the
jerk who who who comments on this. I'm pretty sure
by the time we're colonizing other world's we've kind of
(10:44):
nailed the energy problem because that would necessitate us being
able to get to said other world. But off world
is always like the like the crazy wild West. Yeah,
we always have to fusion reactors. Okay, Lauren, you mentioned
a couple of the people who responded to the original
article in the illustrations that these people did. What what
were some of the responses? They were interesting, and we're
(11:07):
talking a lot about this particular this particular prediction because
the conversation that it generated really was fascinating, even if
it was blown out of proportion. So George Dvorsky for
I OH nine thought that Lamb and Quain's ideas actually
didn't go far enough. He suggested that they should have
taken into deeper account the possibility of technological additions and
innovations to human biology, including the idea that we might
(11:32):
be totally cyborgs, or have uploaded our consciousness, or be
controlling robotic avatars from a distance. He he didn't really
comment on the idea that humans might want to stay
human looking, which is that's something I want to talk
about in a bit here, but we can save that. Yeah,
I got I've got some stuff. I think Joe and
I are going to throw down in that in that
part of the conversation, I hope. So all right, just
(11:53):
keep the fight on that side of the table. There
was actually another writer for Forbes responded, though, uh yeah.
Matthew Herper wrote a fairly snippy response entitled and I
quote no, this is not how the human face face
might look in a hundred thousand years um. In it,
he he suggests that the genetic engineering that quantum Lamb
(12:13):
hypothesized about is going to be taking place much sooner um,
and also points out that a hundred thousand years is
only about half the time that Homo sapiens have existed.
As such, you know that that this is right, right right,
This is basically minus you know, grooming and a little
bit of skull size difference. This is how we've looked
(12:34):
for that long. So so you know, a, it's unlikely
that major facial changes will happen in so short and
evolutionary period of time, and and be that it's impossible
to say what tastes and trends will be like in
the future. So therefore, Guessing what features we as as
geneticists and or consumers are going to select in the
future is just pure sci fi speculation, right. I mean,
(12:56):
for one thing, we cannot anticipate what a generation that's
five years removed from our own is going to perceive
as being desirable or attractive. I mean, a fallout has
taught us many things. But no, but but seriously, we don't.
We can't predict what people are going to find attractive
(13:18):
about the human form in one way or another. And
that's part of what will really go into our discussion
little bit later too. But so so yeah, it's really
difficult to suggest that. Also as far as this this
genetic engineering thing about how it's going to happen much sooner. Uh,
that one I'm really curious about because I I foresee
(13:38):
there's gonna be a lot of resistance on that front
for a long time, for for for various reasons, including ethics.
So you're saying it's not just that we might not
have the technological expertise to do it, but that there
might be reasons not to do There will be cultural
and social taboos against genetic engineering, at least in certain
parts of the world. For are a good long time,
(14:01):
is my guess. That's a guess because we don't have
enough right now to really say one way or the other.
But just based upon the reactions we've seen to basic
foundation research that would lead maybe one day to genetic engineering,
we've already seen examples of people really kind of putting
up barriers. Oh sure. Also, I think, and I think
(14:23):
that a few of these nice people brought this up,
um that if we're going to do genetic engineering, we're
probably not going to be peddling around with eye color.
We're going to be say, like wiping out really terrible
diseases and stuff like that first and then maybe after that, Like,
you know, my nose is a little bit big, I'd
like to give my daughter a smaller nose. Is that possible?
(14:45):
Stuff like that. Yeah, I've got more to say about
that in the next setting too, just because just because
human history is filled with people altering themselves. So my
hair is blue right now, so so I totally get that,
But I want to be born with blue hair. I'm
not sure anyway. So uh. There was a response actually
to Herper's response, and a response to the response, Yes,
(15:08):
Kwan actually wrote him this really sick burn email that
was the computation who worked on the original hypothesis here,
and in which Kwan said, and I think this sums
up his I mean, it was a really long email,
so I'm just going to quote part of it, but
I think it sums up his overall argument really well. Okay,
so here we go. The operative word might, as in
(15:31):
this is what the human face might look like in
a hundred thousand years, makes the statement an existential statement,
which means that there is a non zero possibility that
a given event may occur. Given that we agree that
no one can make an absolute statement about the future,
by the same token, you cannot claim to know the
negation of an existential statement. This is not how a
(15:52):
face might look like or it's equivalent. There is no
chance that the human face will look like this, all right,
But I see this other thing in our notes here.
This is kind of interesting to me. Uh, the question
about whether or not we will be taller. Yeah, this
is something that I think has often sort of been imagined.
It might be that we will get taller in the future,
or that we are currently very tall compared to our ancestors,
(16:15):
which I mean, if you've ever been in an old house, yeah, yeah,
or a castle. I just I just walked around a
few castles and there were times where I had to
duck my head and I am not a tall person.
Well it depends on which ancestors, it turns out, and
that's going to come into something. But um so, yeah,
there's this question have we grown taller than we used
to be as a species and will we continue to
(16:37):
grow taller as time goes on? So I want to
start with one fact. A March paper in the Oxford
Economic Journals found that from the mid eighteen hundreds to
nineteen eighty, the average height of European adult males grew
eleven centimeters. That's about four point three is significant. Wait
(16:58):
that was in the Oxford Economic Journals. Was it based
upon how expensive it is to build higher doorways? No,
it turns out actually studying human height uh factors into
economic papers a lot interest. It may reflect certain economic conditions,
like a little bit of a spoiler, but for how
(17:20):
this discussion is going to turn out. But there was
also this other thing I found online that was funny.
It was quote a living bar graph, So it was
a comparison of height distribution among students at Connecticut State
Agricultural College comparing photos taken in nineteen fourteen and then
nineteen seven. So they had different bars basically with like
(17:43):
a you know, five ft two, five ft three, and
then they'd have the students who measured those heights line
up behind each bar, so you'd get a bar graph
made out of actual humans in the phototch and you
can see over time that the distribution of males students
goes up. So the average height of the male students
(18:04):
was sixty seven point three inches in nineteen fourteen, and
that increased to seventy point one inches in nine seven.
That's a difference of two point eight inches or seven
point one centimeters in just eighty three years. Now. Of course,
there may be some self selection in this, because the
Connecticut State at Agricultural College started offering scholarship packages to
(18:25):
taller students in the nineteen fifties. That's yeah, that was
just tough. I mean, you know, if you if you
were below average height, you got the short end of
the stick on that one. Okay, that was totally a joke.
They did not offer scholarship packages to taller students. No,
the students actually wasn't a joke, because to be a joke,
you have to be funny first. Okay, so they add
(18:48):
the student. The male students actually did get taller on average. Um,
so there are more comparisons of average male height over
time than average female height. For example, the ving barographed
from Connecticut. There are no women in the nineteen fourteen photo.
The women in the nine photo average sixty four point
eight inches. But don't worry, in another eighty three years
(19:10):
will be able to compare both men and women. I'm sure.
So can we get a can we get a more
general estimate? Like? Does this apply to women too? Yeah,
it seems like it. So. In a nineteen guest article
for Scientific American, the biologist Michael J. Doherty claimed that
the average height of humans in industrialized countries had grown
(19:31):
by about ten centimeters or four inches over the past
century and a half. Okay, well, let me ask you
this joke. Does this mean that we as a species
are evolving rapidly to become like the next generation of
NBA players? Is that what this is all about? Sadly no,
So what scientists have discovered is that they think we
(19:53):
are not evolving to grow taller and There are a
bunch of reasons for thinking this. Number one is that
it has been a steady progression of much shorter people
long ago, too much taller people now. Instead, if we
study history, it seems to be inconsistent. People get taller
and then they get shorter, and then they get taller again.
Are there any correlating effects that seem to go along
(20:16):
with this taller shorter, taller thing, which perhaps we may
have alluded to spoiling this part of the podcast. So Yeah,
we observe around the world and in recent history that
generations of children who suffer poor nutrition in early development
remain shorter as adults, and when economic conditions improve in
the next generation receives better food, those children tend to
(20:38):
grow up to be taller adults. Is what we seem
to observe. There's this study called anthropometric history, and that's
the study of historical trends in human height. In the
past couple of decades, people in this field have largely
used the historical distribution and human height to study environmental
and economic conditions, not population genetics. Yeah, makes sense. Uh.
(21:01):
And finally that as far as we can tell, we
sort of seem to have leveled off. So while these
increases in average height can be charted over the past
century and a half, were a lot taller on average
than we were a hundred and fifty years ago, people
in industrialized nations aren't really getting much taller anymore. We
we seem to have kind of hit the max. Oh okay, well,
(21:22):
you know that's all right. I wasn't expecting to grow
any taller than I already have figured that my growth
spurts were behind me every day. To be a little taller,
a taller. Well, you know we should. We should put
a little mark on the wall and just have it
being Lauren's height, and we just have our stand under it.
Every day we take another picture. Just the power of wishing.
(21:45):
That's a scientific experiment. It sounds like testing the power
of how tall the heels I can wear? Okay, okay,
how about brains? Huge, huge brains. Part of that that
facial features guestimation was was the four head will grow
because our brains will get bigger, right, so therefore we'll
need more space in our our heads to hold those
(22:06):
those big old brains of ours. Have you ever seen
a movie called This Islander? Yes? I have. You're talking
about the aliens with the enormous brains to two different kinds,
two different kinds, Lauren, let me parce it for it. First,
you had the regular human looking aliens. They just have
human looking is being general. They have hilariously huge foreheads,
(22:28):
like you just had to cram an extra brain in there,
so they made the skull bigger, which is yes, almost.
It's why the MST three K version of it has
one of the characters one of the robots. Just every
time the the alien leader has a line to the
humans and he's posing as a human. Is you just
hear one of the robots say, but I'm not an alien.
(22:50):
But then later in the movie you get an alien
this brain mutant. So it's just got a huge, bulging
brain and that's basically its head and expose giant brain
with goggles. Is that what we're going to be because
obviously we want our we want our brains to get
more powerful. If we're thinking that we're going to continue
to upgrade our intelligence, if we can genetically engineer ourselves
(23:13):
to be smarter, that's gott I mean, we're going to
have gigantoid brains. Right. Well, first of all, let's let's
let's look back at history, right, we need to look
back at our our ancestors and the and the and
the predecessors to the humans. Sure, and it's certainly true
that that human brains are a hominid brains at the
very least have gotten much bigger over the past, say
(23:34):
two to three million years. Yeah, that's right, So our
brains have more than doubled in size since more than
more than two two and a half million years ago.
But does that necessarily mean that size is directly correlated
with intelligence. There are some correlations, but it's not a
totally direct correlation, right, It's not one to one certainly. Well, yeah,
(23:58):
I mean there there are some studies that show that
that brain size and intelligence are not so closely correlated
that you know, you would say, oh, this persent has
a larger brain, therefore they are automatically smarter than this
other person. Right, So, one example I'd like to give
is that on average, men have slightly bigger brains than women.
But don't take this and run with it, you woman
(24:21):
hating jerks. That does not mean men are smarter than women.
In fact, men are not measurably smarter than women. It
seems that For example, one one thing explaining part of
this is that women have more densely crowded neurons in
some parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Uh. Women
may have up to twelve percent more neurons in the
cortex than men. And then there is the fact that
(24:44):
it's actually the brain to body mass ratio that is
a little bit more predictive of intelligence. But even then
you have some variation with that. Sure. Well, like like
an elephant's brain can wait four times is that of
a humans? Um? And they, as far as I know,
don't do many of the complex things that we do.
(25:06):
If they do, they're really good at hiding it. Um. No,
they need those those big brains to control their huge
muscle blocks. Well that makes sense. Um, there's there's also okay,
so within the human species itself, the largest Homo sapiens
brains on record belong to the chro Magnets, which were
a subset of early modern humans who lived some forty
(25:28):
thousand years ago. And and some people theorize that they
needed those bigger skulls, uh, not to you know, do
computational science, but but rather to chew their less refined
food or you know, simply having a thick skull to
like survive infancy. That's really useful. They might have been
calculating how long it would take them to chew that food.
It's don't I don't know. I've never asked one. I
(25:52):
want to throw an even bigger wrench into this and say, okay,
so we've established that it's not necessarily just a brain
size issue. Brain size is correlated to intelligence, but it's
not a one to one thing. But this is the
craziest thing. Our brains may not even right now be
the biggest they've ever been. Modern humans we should probably
(26:15):
say are the most intellectually advanced SPECIs as far as
we know. I mean, but the most intellectually advanced ones
that we've encountered at any rate, and not including dolphins
and and certainly for smarter overall than Cora magnets. Probably, yeah,
most likely. But what if our brains had been bigger
than they are now? Yeah? There is evidence that they
(26:36):
have been shrinking recently. According to paleo anthropologist John Hawks
in this really great Discover magazine article, um over the
past twenty years, the average volume of the human male
brain has decreased from about one five cubic centimeters to
about one thousand, three hundred and fifty um and that's okay.
Conversions are awkward. From metric to imperial that's like six
(27:01):
and the third cups of brain to about five and
two third cups of brain are like three point two
points to two point eight five points. It's a chunk
about the size of a tennis ball. Um and and
and and women's brains, for the record, have have shrunk
proportionally as well. So wait a minute, how are they
explaining this? Are we getting dumber than we used to be? Um? Well, okay,
(27:24):
so so they've tread carefully. Different paleontologists and anthropologists have
different theories about why and how and the exact effect
that this is having on on humans as a society. Um.
The first is that, yeah, we're getting dumber, um uh.
And and and Magnans were not less intelligent. I either
(27:45):
do to something like have you guys seen idiocracy? Um yeah,
just just the lowest common denominator becoming the greatest denominator?
Um uh. And or that as a society, you know,
being a society means that we don't have to be
so smart to stay alive individually. There is not as
much of an imperative for intelligence because collectively we're able
(28:07):
to handle so much, right. Um. Another theory put forth
is that our brains are getting more efficient, um, both
more agile and also more energy efficient, allowing us to
concentrate less on food and more on playing really awesome
guitar riffs well sure, um. Or perhaps that we've domesticated ourselves. Um.
(28:29):
A marker of tame animals after many generations is a
smaller brain size, which again kind of goes back into
that idea of they don't need as large a brain
because they don't have They don't have to rely so
much on survival skills because I got a big old
dumb human taking care of them, right right um. Or finally,
that are changing diet means that our food is so
(28:51):
much easier to eat that our skulls don't need to
be as big for us to chew it. And also,
I mean, I I don't think that we mentioned this before,
but a definite uh impediment to you know, ludicrously large
unnervingly large brains is that the human birth canal is
not getting proportionately larger anytime soon. I don't think, I
mean like like it would require the birth canal to
(29:14):
get larger, or or human hips to get larger. Well,
by that time, we'll all be born in artificial wombs.
Oh okay, yeah, like the matrix will just be in
little pods. Okay. I think by that time, we're actually
gotten to the point where our brains are just in jars,
and so then you'll be bragging to everyone else about
how big your jar is. Okay, yeah, I want to
switch to a different topic. Okay, please do. Are we
(29:34):
gonna become the borg? Because this is what everybody imagines, right,
So we were heading towards the singularity. We're gonna start
incorporating more technology into our brains, into our bodies to
supplement all the things we can't do with these weak,
puny little muscles and the gray matter up here. Why
not just cram computers into our skin so we'll have
(29:54):
little wires and circuit boards popping out everywhere. I feel
like this sort of ties into divorce. These comment on
the first the first article we were talking about. Yeah,
I mean, he seemed to think we weren't going far enough. Yeah,
I mean, I mean, if I could replace one eye
with little blinking LEDs that say something clever and morse
code I probably would today. Okay, there you go. Alright, well, Joe,
(30:16):
I want to hear I want to hear your your
point of view on this because then I want to,
uh to engage in a discussion about this, because I
have I have some thoughts on my own. Yeah, Okay,
Well I kind of doubt that. I mean, I don't know,
maybe because of course human culture and what we find
attractive is it's adaptable. We know to some extent, we
(30:38):
don't know to what extent. And I would guess, based
on my affinity for something called the biophilia hypothesis, that
we probably aren't going to want ourselves to look to
computer y and machine e so that that hypothesis is
the EO. Wilson one. Right, Yeah, So this is put
(30:59):
forth by EO. Wilson. There have been a lot of
people who have written about it, and the biophilia hypothesis
is what it sounds like. It's the idea that living
organisms like humans have an inherent, deeply instinctual affinity for
other living organisms and living systems, so that we are
always going to prefer organic life to artifactual synthetic types
(31:23):
of objects, and that humans, you'd always prefer a forest
to room with concrete walls, and that that and that
that goes deep. It's not just sort of a cultural
institution like, uh, yeah, you know forests are nice because
I learned that when I was a kid. It's it's
part of the animal that we are to prefer those things.
(31:45):
That that's sort of I mean, it's still a hypothesis.
Of course, that's not something that's proven to be true,
but that it seems to ring true to me. Interesting,
so uh and of course sorry, to complete the thought, sure,
how this would apply to humans would be to say
that no, maybe our our cultural appreciation for what humans
should look like it can change, but it doesn't go
(32:06):
that far. It doesn't go to the point where we
want humans to stop looking organic. Sure, Like, you know,
taking it back to the board kind of reference, there's
probably a reason that the board were these horrifying villains
and not really the good guys. Until we got a
sexy lady borg. It was okay to be one of
the good guys because we had taken most of that
(32:27):
weird computer stuff off. Well, and there's some things and
we've we've referenced some of this earlier there's some things
that if you were to change them about the human face,
they do for most people, uh, illicit a sense of
unease or even horror. We've seen that used to great
effect in horror movies where you often have um villainous
(32:48):
human characters or quasi human in the case of some
of these, because they have appeared to have some sort
of supernatural et right, but they often have faces that
are asymmetrical, or you will end up creating a sense
of horror by taking a person's face and then suddenly
distorting it in some way. There's the scene in In
the Ring where it's a very quick flash of a
(33:11):
person whose face has been distorted so like their nose
has been this place, their eyes get a little out
of alignment, and it does created a really shocking sense
of unease among a very wide audience. I mean, it's
just one of those kind of reactions. Uh and and
quick quick sidetrack on that one. I think that that's
what uh lamb and quon we're talking about with the
(33:32):
golden rule and end symmetry, because you mean the golden ratio,
the gold under you ive by that rule, Yes, the
golden ratio. Thank you, Joe that yes, and because um,
one of the markers of beauty, and and I mean,
of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder
(33:54):
and all of that kind of stuff. But no, it's
it's also scientific, um that that a symmetrical face is
considered beautiful. Well, a couple of things I wanted to say.
One of them is actually in the notes, which is that, uh,
they any sort of technological enhancements do not necessarily mean
we are going to have great cosmetic changes in a
person's appearance. Right. That's one thing I predicted is that, well,
(34:15):
it seems pretty obvious that if we can give you,
if we can upgrade your brain with computers, we can
probably do it in a way that's not going to
be too visually obtrusive. Right. There might be some that
people choose to have, Like you were talking about an
LED light that blinks out Morse code in place of
an eye lareen. But that was just a Patrick Stewart
Bard reference. But even so, even though that's that's a
(34:37):
joking reference, I could easily see technological enhancements or body
modification being something that gets embraced by perhaps at first
a yeah subculture, but then get embraced by a larger culture.
And the reason why I feel pretty confident about that
is that human history is filled with examples of people
(35:00):
undergoing various types of body modification in pursuit of some
sort of perceived beauty that was supported by that culture.
There were a lot of different reasons for something to
be seen as beautiful depending upon the culture. For example,
there's the foot binding in Chinese culture, which was in
part seen as a a you know, the ideal of
(35:21):
female beauty was to have that lotus foot. It was
also in part as a means of subjugating women. So
it's all, you know, culturally tied up. It's not just
like this is what we considered to be beautiful. It's
very complex exactly. But the fact that we've seen things
like piercings and tattoos become more more accepted in a
(35:41):
Western culture over the last I mean even in my lifetime,
I've seen that the fact that I have a shaved
head and that is considered to be culturally fine in
in America, that has changed. When I first started doing it,
it was before you saw it pretty frequently, and so
I don't know if guys just were holding onto their
(36:01):
hair more back then, but I frequently encountered people who
had not really talked to anyone who had ever shaved
their head. It was it was really an unusual experience
for them. So I had a lot of people asking
if they could touch my head. Thankfully, that part of
my life is behind me, I guess, because now we've
hit a kind of u uh, you know, saturation point
of bald guys, particularly the bald guys would goatee Heisenberg appearance.
(36:26):
So at any rate, we've seen changes like changes and
ideas of beauty and modification happened over the past. So
I don't think that we will necessarily see a future
where this sort of thing isn't embraced, and perhaps at
first it'll be a very niche cultural kind of thing.
(36:47):
But I don't necessarily think that we're going to have
uh people avoiding it forever either. It may be that
humans sixty thousand years into the future look extremely different
because they have modified themselves in numerous ways. I mean,
I can imagine being able to give yourself like electrically
glittery skin or that kind of thing. You know, it's
(37:09):
it's it's definitely in that realm of science fiction, you know,
kind of anime style in a way. But I don't
think it's necessarily beyond believability. I think the prime time
to introduce glittery skin body mods would have been, you know,
five or six years ago, whenever it was Twilight Big.
Really it would have been in the mid nineteen seventies
(37:30):
with David Bowie glam Rock. Okay, either are going to
be really necessary. Way, Well, I want to offer another,
uh concession to what you say, is that we may
adapt to it. I thought also that getting all borged
out could in the future become an example of a
kind of performative consumption. Right, so if it if it
(37:52):
costs money to get cybernetic implants and things like, it's
a status symbol exactly. It could be the future's equivalent
of wearing expense of jewelry and driving flashy sports cars.
You you advertise your financial value by gluing computer parts
to your face and all this. You might even have
people faking it, like they don't actually have cybernetic implants,
(38:12):
they're just sticking stuff on their bodies. So this would
be an intermediary step from the brains and the jars
in my jar is bigger than your jar. Yeah, you're
saying it could be and bigger than. If this were
the case, it's sort of be a question of competition
between the need to show your value and this desire
to fill the natural biophelia. If that, in fact is
(38:34):
is true. You know, I think again, I can totally
understand people saying that this hypothesis rings true, this biophelia hypothesis. Uh, certainly,
there are plenty of examples if we just look at
our fiction of that being true, where you either have
the perfect hero and the disfigured villain, or you have
the disfigured hero who whom everyone treats as a villain
(38:58):
unfairly do simply because of their their appearance. But then
it's revealed that the this person is actually beautiful on
the inside and it becomes you know, an object lesson
for for the reader. Yeah, exactly, so, there there's plenty
of examples just in human experience that support this hypothesis. Obviously,
that's not, you know enough, from a scientific perspective. It's
(39:21):
merely anecdotal, But it's anecdotal supported by at least in
Western culture, hundreds of years of literature and and uh,
and in theater and that sort of thing. Well, and
there are actual scientists debating this. Toime, it's not just
speculations right right now, I'm just saying that, you know,
we can't we don't have the scientific uh you know,
uh consensus on this yet, but there seems to be
(39:43):
quite a bit of support from other parts of the
human experience or you know. The other thing we could
say is that even if it is a deeply rooted,
deeply instinctual genetic predisposition, we have to prefer things that
look living versus things that look ARTIFICI shoal today, maybe
we'll evolve that could be a thing that we change
(40:04):
about ourselves. So at any rate, this has really been
a very interesting discussion. I mean, it's it is something
that's interesting to think about, like what are people going
to look like in the future? Will we And we've
got plenty of examples in science fiction of the idea
of cosmetic surgery gone run amuck, where people have have
taken the what we consider to be uh, either the
(40:26):
ideal or examples of outliers of cosmic surgery today and
then they just multiply that by a hundred so that
we get these truly at least to us outrageous examples
of of modification that who knows, perhaps in uh in
in several thousand years, these things that seemed completely extreme
and ludicrous to us might not seem that way in
(40:48):
the future. It may very well be that these things
that we think are absurd now are just the norm. Yeah. So, ultimately,
when it comes down to what are humans gonna look
like in the future, we have to say we do
not know. There is there is no mean, there's no
way of predicting it because so many different factors are
come into play when it comes to human appearance, and
(41:09):
human preference is one of those, and that changes from
generation to generations or a minute a minute, Yeah, it
just takes me back to college. So anyway, guys, Uh,
I think this was a fun topic. It was not
something that we would normally tackle, right, It was a
little bit outside of it. And but I love that
it's also in that kind of things that are not
(41:31):
always addressed in science fiction realm, and I love that
we're doing these sort of topics. So you guys, if
you enjoy these topics, make sure you get in touch
with us. Let's know what you like. Uh, let's know
if there are any topics specifically that you think we
have to tackle. You know, why is it in science
fiction films you never see X and um, I'm sure
we're gonna get some interesting examples and I can't wait
(41:53):
to read them. So let's know. On Twitter, on Facebook,
or Google Plus. You can find us with the handle
f W Thinking and we will talk to you again
really soon. For more on this topic and the future
of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com Problem brought to
(42:21):
you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says that face,
that face, that lovable face. It melts my Swedish heart.
(00:21):
I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Focab, and I'm Joe McCormick.
And I'm not supposed to be here for this episode.
I was on vacation, but you guys actually decided to
wait for me and let me talk about about human
appearances changing over time, and it's so exciting to be well,
we knew we were going to have to talk about
what humans would look like in the future, and Jonathan,
(00:44):
I think you are what humans are going to look
like in the future. So sorry for all of humanity.
We couldn't really do it without you. I appreciate that. No,
I mean the more I've read into your notes and
read the references and everything you guys had had really
put together, I was really excited to hear this because
this is pretty fascinating stuff. Oh yeah, and this is
(01:05):
kind of part of our series. This originated as part
of our series on what we don't see enough of
in science fiction, right, though you do see some of this.
But yeah, if you project forward a little bit in
science fiction, look a few thousand years into the future.
Part of the problem is you've got aliens who look
alien and then unless it's Star Trek, in which case
(01:27):
they look human, right or yeah, yeah, there's some sort
of ridge somewhere on their face. And you've got humans
who look exactly like humans look whenever the movie was made.
Although you know, Patrick Stewart is captain Jean Loup Picard,
you know what, you might be onto something about they
look the future looks like me. He needs a goateee
but yeah, yeah, and he needs to put on a
(01:49):
few pounds. But other than that, yeah, no, we wanted
to I'm okay with it now, we we we we
really wanted to take a look at what will I mean,
what what's the prevailing thought about what human appearance is
going to be? And as it turns out, it's a
very tricky thing to talk about for multiple reasons. Well,
of course you can't really predict, right, I mean, it's
(02:11):
one of those things where there's not a a clear
projection that will be controlled by human behavior. Right, It's
like kind of a it's kind of willy nilly, and
it's kind of random. Right, there's not like a a
simulation we can pull up where we just have a
slider and we said, all right, let's just slide it
forward fifty years. Oh, that's what we're gonna look like arms. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
(02:35):
So we wanted to kind of talk about some of
the scholarship behind this and the thoughts behind this, and
really kind of dive into this topic and talk about
some of the possibilities. Right. So, just last year, there
was actually a funny news story and then a lot
of back and forth between people in the media and
the scientific community about this one particular article that Forbes published, Right,
(02:59):
it went pretty viral. They published this this tech blog
and or article and or content piece. I'm not sure
exactly what, right um, it was called how the human
Face Might look in a hundred thousand years. So this
was June of last year. This was junect and h
in it, Forbes staffer Parmi Olsen reported on work that
(03:21):
had been done by by this digital artist named Nicola
Lamb in collaboration with a computational genomist named Dr Alan Quan.
I didn't even know computational genomist was a was a
thing me neither. Pretty awesome, congratulations to that guy. And
so in their work they speculated on what the face
might look like in twenty thousand, sixty and a hundred
(03:43):
thousand years. Okay, So so what did they come up with. Well,
you guys might have seen a picture of this somewhere.
It basically the furthest view out was the sort of
anime character looking thing, right, okay, gigantic eyes, gigantic eyes,
kind of weird big forehead. Uh and you're not so
far sunny like me. Now, My eyes are not gigantic.
(04:05):
I do have the weird big forehead though, That's okay.
So their predictions fall into into a few broad categories. Okay.
They suggested that the forehead will get longer and wider
to accommodate a larger brain. We'll talk more about this
way at the end of the podcast. Um that the
eyes will get larger approaching and I quote unnerving lye large.
This is what we call Disney princess large. As as
(04:27):
we adapt to dimmer off earth environments and as we
become more innocent, right. Um that our nostrils will get
larger and our hair denser to help with breathing and
heat retention off world. That way, I hope the timeline
on this is really accelerated because that hair density thing
is very very pertinent to me. Um. That our skin
(04:50):
will get darker to help combat UV radiation outside of
Earth's ozone, That we'll ditch wearable tech for subtle implants um.
And that perhaps most importantly, genetic manipulation will render natural
evolution moot um, likely resulting in increasingly normal human features
with an emphasis on on symmetry and the golden ratio
(05:13):
and that kind of ideal of human and normal normal
and ideal there being in quotation really heavy quotation marks
in case you can't tell my sarcasm voice, which I
am told sometimes sounds a lot like my normal. Well yeah,
now the exactly because normal, I mean, who defines what
normal is in this case and this they're specifically looking
(05:35):
at these these uh ideals which have been held up
as ideals only by certain types certain cultures. Um. So yeah,
you gotta take that with a grain of salt. Yeah.
Another thing to note is that they're not suggesting that
this is how humans will grow to look because of say,
natural selection, they're saying that this is how we will
(05:55):
basically decide will engineer, We will choose features and you know,
so Gattica ask everyone will end up looking like Jude Law.
Well I'm okay with that too actually, but the uh
pretty man. But anyway, the the what I was going
to go into here is that, uh, if some of
this kind of makes sense from sort of a top
(06:18):
level approach, right, the idea that if we are to
go colonize other planets, there will likely be uh situations
there that will be different enough from what we have
here at Earth that we would need some form of
adaptation to be able to thrive on said planet. And
so while it might not be uh efficacious for us
(06:41):
to wait for evolution to take hold so that whichever
humans survive that initial colonization end up producing generation upon
generation upon generation. Uh you know, multiply that out ten
thousand times. Do you get to a group of human
beings or what used to be human beings who are
ideally suited for that planet. It may it's more sense
that we would be taking an approach where we're making
(07:03):
those choices consciously. Well, I mean, these days, in the
ideal scenario, we do all we can to prevent natural
selection from happening to humans frequently. Yeah, I had a joke,
but I'm going to leave it on this case. You cat,
you can thank me later, all right. So an observation
I had about their predictions is that if you just
(07:26):
take them as like, these are some kind of fun,
interesting guesses, I think they are interesting total to go with.
But there's sort of the question of, like, at what
level are these being pitched. Are they just saying, here
are some interesting suggestions, or are they saying we've got
a pretty good idea what humans are going to look like?
And I think that exact distinction was embodied in a
(07:48):
lot of the responses. Oh yeah, because there is this
whole flurry of response on the internet. Do you, guys,
do you believe that the Internet took something way more
seriously than they perhaps should have and blew it out
of proportion. Um. I'm sorry, that's my sarcasm voice is
strong today. UM. And I do want to point out
here that that Nicolae Lamb is the guy who created
that average Barbie doll that also went viral in um.
(08:12):
If you remember the side by side photos of a
of a of a store bought Barbie with a barbie
who is shaped more or less like a human person.
Um uh, yeah, he's that guy. He also is behind
the Lammily doll line, which he kicks started in two
to work towards producing realistic shaped dolls for kids. Because Okay,
a thing to keep in mind about Lamb's work is
(08:34):
that he's really savvy about producing stuff that will capture
the public's imagination and click throughs. So, in other words,
like this could be something where uh he imagines a
scenario and then and then frames it in such a
way that it's compelling enough for people to look at,
participate in discussion about, but doesn't necessarily indicate any kind
(08:56):
of expertise necessarily that or or scholarship that went into
the the ultimate design or or or guess I think
very much that Um that you know that that he
and the other fellow Quan were trying to make an
interesting thing, perhaps more so than an extraordinarily accurate future prediction. Well,
(09:18):
and and one other thing I would point out, and
some of the other discussions we're going to to chat
about will sort of fall into this as well, is
that while we could go the engineering route to try
and take tackle some of these these issues. Another thing
we could try, besides, you know, altering ourselves, is altering
(09:38):
the environment we're going into, and therefore you wouldn't have
the environmental requirement to adapt. We could adapt the environment,
which is pretty much what humans have been doing for
the last couple hundred years. Yeah. Typically we don't biologically
adapt to our environments anymore. We adapt the environments, or
we technologically adapt, right, right, right, You don't need crazy
anime eyes if you have lamp, right right, that's a
(10:02):
good point a Pitch Dark couldn't have, or is it
pitch black? Pitch Black? That Pitch Black couldn't happen because
because you know, that's a that's actually a good Vin
Diesel movie, and you're gonna destroy the few good I'm
not going to take Pitch Black away from us, all right.
I think the thinking is that huge anime eyes would
(10:22):
help protect the environment because you wouldn't need to use
as much energy on lamps or in situations where energy
is scarce. I'm pretty sure that our energy problem, I
don't know, I'm pretty sure, and I know you're you're
you're making a joke, but I have to be the
jerk who who who comments on this. I'm pretty sure
by the time we're colonizing other world's we've kind of
(10:44):
nailed the energy problem because that would necessitate us being
able to get to said other world. But off world
is always like the like the crazy wild West. Yeah,
we always have to fusion reactors. Okay, Lauren, you mentioned
a couple of the people who responded to the original
article in the illustrations that these people did. What what
were some of the responses? They were interesting, and we're
(11:07):
talking a lot about this particular this particular prediction because
the conversation that it generated really was fascinating, even if
it was blown out of proportion. So George Dvorsky for
I OH nine thought that Lamb and Quain's ideas actually
didn't go far enough. He suggested that they should have
taken into deeper account the possibility of technological additions and
innovations to human biology, including the idea that we might
(11:32):
be totally cyborgs, or have uploaded our consciousness, or be
controlling robotic avatars from a distance. He he didn't really
comment on the idea that humans might want to stay
human looking, which is that's something I want to talk
about in a bit here, but we can save that. Yeah,
I got I've got some stuff. I think Joe and
I are going to throw down in that in that
part of the conversation, I hope. So all right, just
(11:53):
keep the fight on that side of the table. There
was actually another writer for Forbes responded, though, uh yeah.
Matthew Herper wrote a fairly snippy response entitled and I
quote no, this is not how the human face face
might look in a hundred thousand years um. In it,
he he suggests that the genetic engineering that quantum Lamb
(12:13):
hypothesized about is going to be taking place much sooner um,
and also points out that a hundred thousand years is
only about half the time that Homo sapiens have existed.
As such, you know that that this is right, right right,
This is basically minus you know, grooming and a little
bit of skull size difference. This is how we've looked
(12:34):
for that long. So so you know, a, it's unlikely
that major facial changes will happen in so short and
evolutionary period of time, and and be that it's impossible
to say what tastes and trends will be like in
the future. So therefore, Guessing what features we as as
geneticists and or consumers are going to select in the
future is just pure sci fi speculation, right. I mean,
(12:56):
for one thing, we cannot anticipate what a generation that's
five years removed from our own is going to perceive
as being desirable or attractive. I mean, a fallout has
taught us many things. But no, but but seriously, we don't.
We can't predict what people are going to find attractive
(13:18):
about the human form in one way or another. And
that's part of what will really go into our discussion
little bit later too. But so so yeah, it's really
difficult to suggest that. Also as far as this this
genetic engineering thing about how it's going to happen much sooner. Uh,
that one I'm really curious about because I I foresee
(13:38):
there's gonna be a lot of resistance on that front
for a long time, for for for various reasons, including ethics.
So you're saying it's not just that we might not
have the technological expertise to do it, but that there
might be reasons not to do There will be cultural
and social taboos against genetic engineering, at least in certain
parts of the world. For are a good long time,
(14:01):
is my guess. That's a guess because we don't have
enough right now to really say one way or the other.
But just based upon the reactions we've seen to basic
foundation research that would lead maybe one day to genetic engineering,
we've already seen examples of people really kind of putting
up barriers. Oh sure. Also, I think, and I think
(14:23):
that a few of these nice people brought this up,
um that if we're going to do genetic engineering, we're
probably not going to be peddling around with eye color.
We're going to be say, like wiping out really terrible
diseases and stuff like that first and then maybe after that, Like,
you know, my nose is a little bit big, I'd
like to give my daughter a smaller nose. Is that possible?
(14:45):
Stuff like that. Yeah, I've got more to say about
that in the next setting too, just because just because
human history is filled with people altering themselves. So my
hair is blue right now, so so I totally get that,
But I want to be born with blue hair. I'm
not sure anyway. So uh. There was a response actually
to Herper's response, and a response to the response, Yes,
(15:08):
Kwan actually wrote him this really sick burn email that
was the computation who worked on the original hypothesis here,
and in which Kwan said, and I think this sums
up his I mean, it was a really long email,
so I'm just going to quote part of it, but
I think it sums up his overall argument really well. Okay,
so here we go. The operative word might, as in
(15:31):
this is what the human face might look like in
a hundred thousand years, makes the statement an existential statement,
which means that there is a non zero possibility that
a given event may occur. Given that we agree that
no one can make an absolute statement about the future,
by the same token, you cannot claim to know the
negation of an existential statement. This is not how a
(15:52):
face might look like or it's equivalent. There is no
chance that the human face will look like this, all right,
But I see this other thing in our notes here.
This is kind of interesting to me. Uh, the question
about whether or not we will be taller. Yeah, this
is something that I think has often sort of been imagined.
It might be that we will get taller in the future,
or that we are currently very tall compared to our ancestors,
(16:15):
which I mean, if you've ever been in an old house, yeah, yeah,
or a castle. I just I just walked around a
few castles and there were times where I had to
duck my head and I am not a tall person.
Well it depends on which ancestors, it turns out, and
that's going to come into something. But um so, yeah,
there's this question have we grown taller than we used
to be as a species and will we continue to
(16:37):
grow taller as time goes on? So I want to
start with one fact. A March paper in the Oxford
Economic Journals found that from the mid eighteen hundreds to
nineteen eighty, the average height of European adult males grew
eleven centimeters. That's about four point three is significant. Wait
(16:58):
that was in the Oxford Economic Journals. Was it based
upon how expensive it is to build higher doorways? No,
it turns out actually studying human height uh factors into
economic papers a lot interest. It may reflect certain economic conditions,
like a little bit of a spoiler, but for how
(17:20):
this discussion is going to turn out. But there was
also this other thing I found online that was funny.
It was quote a living bar graph, So it was
a comparison of height distribution among students at Connecticut State
Agricultural College comparing photos taken in nineteen fourteen and then
nineteen seven. So they had different bars basically with like
(17:43):
a you know, five ft two, five ft three, and
then they'd have the students who measured those heights line
up behind each bar, so you'd get a bar graph
made out of actual humans in the phototch and you
can see over time that the distribution of males students
goes up. So the average height of the male students
(18:04):
was sixty seven point three inches in nineteen fourteen, and
that increased to seventy point one inches in nine seven.
That's a difference of two point eight inches or seven
point one centimeters in just eighty three years. Now. Of course,
there may be some self selection in this, because the
Connecticut State at Agricultural College started offering scholarship packages to
(18:25):
taller students in the nineteen fifties. That's yeah, that was
just tough. I mean, you know, if you if you
were below average height, you got the short end of
the stick on that one. Okay, that was totally a joke.
They did not offer scholarship packages to taller students. No,
the students actually wasn't a joke, because to be a joke,
you have to be funny first. Okay, so they add
(18:48):
the student. The male students actually did get taller on average. Um,
so there are more comparisons of average male height over
time than average female height. For example, the ving barographed
from Connecticut. There are no women in the nineteen fourteen photo.
The women in the nine photo average sixty four point
eight inches. But don't worry, in another eighty three years
(19:10):
will be able to compare both men and women. I'm sure.
So can we get a can we get a more
general estimate? Like? Does this apply to women too? Yeah,
it seems like it. So. In a nineteen guest article
for Scientific American, the biologist Michael J. Doherty claimed that
the average height of humans in industrialized countries had grown
(19:31):
by about ten centimeters or four inches over the past
century and a half. Okay, well, let me ask you
this joke. Does this mean that we as a species
are evolving rapidly to become like the next generation of
NBA players? Is that what this is all about? Sadly no,
So what scientists have discovered is that they think we
(19:53):
are not evolving to grow taller and There are a
bunch of reasons for thinking this. Number one is that
it has been a steady progression of much shorter people
long ago, too much taller people now. Instead, if we
study history, it seems to be inconsistent. People get taller
and then they get shorter, and then they get taller again.
Are there any correlating effects that seem to go along
(20:16):
with this taller shorter, taller thing, which perhaps we may
have alluded to spoiling this part of the podcast. So Yeah,
we observe around the world and in recent history that
generations of children who suffer poor nutrition in early development
remain shorter as adults, and when economic conditions improve in
the next generation receives better food, those children tend to
(20:38):
grow up to be taller adults. Is what we seem
to observe. There's this study called anthropometric history, and that's
the study of historical trends in human height. In the
past couple of decades, people in this field have largely
used the historical distribution and human height to study environmental
and economic conditions, not population genetics. Yeah, makes sense. Uh.
(21:01):
And finally that as far as we can tell, we
sort of seem to have leveled off. So while these
increases in average height can be charted over the past
century and a half, were a lot taller on average
than we were a hundred and fifty years ago, people
in industrialized nations aren't really getting much taller anymore. We
we seem to have kind of hit the max. Oh okay, well,
(21:22):
you know that's all right. I wasn't expecting to grow
any taller than I already have figured that my growth
spurts were behind me every day. To be a little taller,
a taller. Well, you know we should. We should put
a little mark on the wall and just have it
being Lauren's height, and we just have our stand under it.
Every day we take another picture. Just the power of wishing.
(21:45):
That's a scientific experiment. It sounds like testing the power
of how tall the heels I can wear? Okay, okay,
how about brains? Huge, huge brains. Part of that that
facial features guestimation was was the four head will grow
because our brains will get bigger, right, so therefore we'll
need more space in our our heads to hold those
(22:06):
those big old brains of ours. Have you ever seen
a movie called This Islander? Yes? I have. You're talking
about the aliens with the enormous brains to two different kinds,
two different kinds, Lauren, let me parce it for it. First,
you had the regular human looking aliens. They just have
human looking is being general. They have hilariously huge foreheads,
(22:28):
like you just had to cram an extra brain in there,
so they made the skull bigger, which is yes, almost.
It's why the MST three K version of it has
one of the characters one of the robots. Just every
time the the alien leader has a line to the
humans and he's posing as a human. Is you just
hear one of the robots say, but I'm not an alien.
(22:50):
But then later in the movie you get an alien
this brain mutant. So it's just got a huge, bulging
brain and that's basically its head and expose giant brain
with goggles. Is that what we're going to be because
obviously we want our we want our brains to get
more powerful. If we're thinking that we're going to continue
to upgrade our intelligence, if we can genetically engineer ourselves
(23:13):
to be smarter, that's gott I mean, we're going to
have gigantoid brains. Right. Well, first of all, let's let's
let's look back at history, right, we need to look
back at our our ancestors and the and the and
the predecessors to the humans. Sure, and it's certainly true
that that human brains are a hominid brains at the
very least have gotten much bigger over the past, say
(23:34):
two to three million years. Yeah, that's right, So our
brains have more than doubled in size since more than
more than two two and a half million years ago.
But does that necessarily mean that size is directly correlated
with intelligence. There are some correlations, but it's not a
totally direct correlation, right, It's not one to one certainly. Well, yeah,
(23:58):
I mean there there are some studies that show that
that brain size and intelligence are not so closely correlated
that you know, you would say, oh, this persent has
a larger brain, therefore they are automatically smarter than this
other person. Right, So, one example I'd like to give
is that on average, men have slightly bigger brains than women.
But don't take this and run with it, you woman
(24:21):
hating jerks. That does not mean men are smarter than women.
In fact, men are not measurably smarter than women. It
seems that For example, one one thing explaining part of
this is that women have more densely crowded neurons in
some parts of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Uh. Women
may have up to twelve percent more neurons in the
cortex than men. And then there is the fact that
(24:44):
it's actually the brain to body mass ratio that is
a little bit more predictive of intelligence. But even then
you have some variation with that. Sure. Well, like like
an elephant's brain can wait four times is that of
a humans? Um? And they, as far as I know,
don't do many of the complex things that we do.
(25:06):
If they do, they're really good at hiding it. Um. No,
they need those those big brains to control their huge
muscle blocks. Well that makes sense. Um, there's there's also okay,
so within the human species itself, the largest Homo sapiens
brains on record belong to the chro Magnets, which were
a subset of early modern humans who lived some forty
(25:28):
thousand years ago. And and some people theorize that they
needed those bigger skulls, uh, not to you know, do
computational science, but but rather to chew their less refined
food or you know, simply having a thick skull to
like survive infancy. That's really useful. They might have been
calculating how long it would take them to chew that food.
It's don't I don't know. I've never asked one. I
(25:52):
want to throw an even bigger wrench into this and say, okay,
so we've established that it's not necessarily just a brain
size issue. Brain size is correlated to intelligence, but it's
not a one to one thing. But this is the
craziest thing. Our brains may not even right now be
the biggest they've ever been. Modern humans we should probably
(26:15):
say are the most intellectually advanced SPECIs as far as
we know. I mean, but the most intellectually advanced ones
that we've encountered at any rate, and not including dolphins
and and certainly for smarter overall than Cora magnets. Probably, yeah,
most likely. But what if our brains had been bigger
than they are now? Yeah? There is evidence that they
(26:36):
have been shrinking recently. According to paleo anthropologist John Hawks
in this really great Discover magazine article, um over the
past twenty years, the average volume of the human male
brain has decreased from about one five cubic centimeters to
about one thousand, three hundred and fifty um and that's okay.
Conversions are awkward. From metric to imperial that's like six
(27:01):
and the third cups of brain to about five and
two third cups of brain are like three point two
points to two point eight five points. It's a chunk
about the size of a tennis ball. Um and and
and and women's brains, for the record, have have shrunk
proportionally as well. So wait a minute, how are they
explaining this? Are we getting dumber than we used to be? Um? Well, okay,
(27:24):
so so they've tread carefully. Different paleontologists and anthropologists have
different theories about why and how and the exact effect
that this is having on on humans as a society. Um.
The first is that, yeah, we're getting dumber, um uh.
And and and Magnans were not less intelligent. I either
(27:45):
do to something like have you guys seen idiocracy? Um yeah,
just just the lowest common denominator becoming the greatest denominator?
Um uh. And or that as a society, you know,
being a society means that we don't have to be
so smart to stay alive individually. There is not as
much of an imperative for intelligence because collectively we're able
(28:07):
to handle so much, right. Um. Another theory put forth
is that our brains are getting more efficient, um, both
more agile and also more energy efficient, allowing us to
concentrate less on food and more on playing really awesome
guitar riffs well sure, um. Or perhaps that we've domesticated ourselves. Um.
(28:29):
A marker of tame animals after many generations is a
smaller brain size, which again kind of goes back into
that idea of they don't need as large a brain
because they don't have They don't have to rely so
much on survival skills because I got a big old
dumb human taking care of them, right right um. Or finally,
that are changing diet means that our food is so
(28:51):
much easier to eat that our skulls don't need to
be as big for us to chew it. And also,
I mean, I I don't think that we mentioned this before,
but a definite uh impediment to you know, ludicrously large
unnervingly large brains is that the human birth canal is
not getting proportionately larger anytime soon. I don't think, I
mean like like it would require the birth canal to
(29:14):
get larger, or or human hips to get larger. Well,
by that time, we'll all be born in artificial wombs.
Oh okay, yeah, like the matrix will just be in
little pods. Okay. I think by that time, we're actually
gotten to the point where our brains are just in jars,
and so then you'll be bragging to everyone else about
how big your jar is. Okay, yeah, I want to
switch to a different topic. Okay, please do. Are we
(29:34):
gonna become the borg? Because this is what everybody imagines, right,
So we were heading towards the singularity. We're gonna start
incorporating more technology into our brains, into our bodies to
supplement all the things we can't do with these weak,
puny little muscles and the gray matter up here. Why
not just cram computers into our skin so we'll have
(29:54):
little wires and circuit boards popping out everywhere. I feel
like this sort of ties into divorce. These comment on
the first the first article we were talking about. Yeah,
I mean, he seemed to think we weren't going far enough. Yeah,
I mean, I mean, if I could replace one eye
with little blinking LEDs that say something clever and morse
code I probably would today. Okay, there you go. Alright, well, Joe,
(30:16):
I want to hear I want to hear your your
point of view on this because then I want to,
uh to engage in a discussion about this, because I
have I have some thoughts on my own. Yeah, Okay,
Well I kind of doubt that. I mean, I don't know,
maybe because of course human culture and what we find
attractive is it's adaptable. We know to some extent, we
(30:38):
don't know to what extent. And I would guess, based
on my affinity for something called the biophilia hypothesis, that
we probably aren't going to want ourselves to look to
computer y and machine e so that that hypothesis is
the EO. Wilson one. Right, Yeah, So this is put
(30:59):
forth by EO. Wilson. There have been a lot of
people who have written about it, and the biophilia hypothesis
is what it sounds like. It's the idea that living
organisms like humans have an inherent, deeply instinctual affinity for
other living organisms and living systems, so that we are
always going to prefer organic life to artifactual synthetic types
(31:23):
of objects, and that humans, you'd always prefer a forest
to room with concrete walls, and that that and that
that goes deep. It's not just sort of a cultural
institution like, uh, yeah, you know forests are nice because
I learned that when I was a kid. It's it's
part of the animal that we are to prefer those things.
(31:45):
That that's sort of I mean, it's still a hypothesis.
Of course, that's not something that's proven to be true,
but that it seems to ring true to me. Interesting,
so uh and of course sorry, to complete the thought, sure,
how this would apply to humans would be to say
that no, maybe our our cultural appreciation for what humans
should look like it can change, but it doesn't go
(32:06):
that far. It doesn't go to the point where we
want humans to stop looking organic. Sure, Like, you know,
taking it back to the board kind of reference, there's
probably a reason that the board were these horrifying villains
and not really the good guys. Until we got a
sexy lady borg. It was okay to be one of
the good guys because we had taken most of that
(32:27):
weird computer stuff off. Well, and there's some things and
we've we've referenced some of this earlier there's some things
that if you were to change them about the human face,
they do for most people, uh, illicit a sense of
unease or even horror. We've seen that used to great
effect in horror movies where you often have um villainous
(32:48):
human characters or quasi human in the case of some
of these, because they have appeared to have some sort
of supernatural et right, but they often have faces that
are asymmetrical, or you will end up creating a sense
of horror by taking a person's face and then suddenly
distorting it in some way. There's the scene in In
the Ring where it's a very quick flash of a
(33:11):
person whose face has been distorted so like their nose
has been this place, their eyes get a little out
of alignment, and it does created a really shocking sense
of unease among a very wide audience. I mean, it's
just one of those kind of reactions. Uh and and
quick quick sidetrack on that one. I think that that's
what uh lamb and quon we're talking about with the
(33:32):
golden rule and end symmetry, because you mean the golden ratio,
the gold under you ive by that rule, Yes, the
golden ratio. Thank you, Joe that yes, and because um,
one of the markers of beauty, and and I mean,
of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder
(33:54):
and all of that kind of stuff. But no, it's
it's also scientific, um that that a symmetrical face is
considered beautiful. Well, a couple of things I wanted to say.
One of them is actually in the notes, which is that, uh,
they any sort of technological enhancements do not necessarily mean
we are going to have great cosmetic changes in a
person's appearance. Right. That's one thing I predicted is that, well,
(34:15):
it seems pretty obvious that if we can give you,
if we can upgrade your brain with computers, we can
probably do it in a way that's not going to
be too visually obtrusive. Right. There might be some that
people choose to have, Like you were talking about an
LED light that blinks out Morse code in place of
an eye lareen. But that was just a Patrick Stewart
Bard reference. But even so, even though that's that's a
(34:37):
joking reference, I could easily see technological enhancements or body
modification being something that gets embraced by perhaps at first
a yeah subculture, but then get embraced by a larger culture.
And the reason why I feel pretty confident about that
is that human history is filled with examples of people
(35:00):
undergoing various types of body modification in pursuit of some
sort of perceived beauty that was supported by that culture.
There were a lot of different reasons for something to
be seen as beautiful depending upon the culture. For example,
there's the foot binding in Chinese culture, which was in
part seen as a a you know, the ideal of
(35:21):
female beauty was to have that lotus foot. It was
also in part as a means of subjugating women. So
it's all, you know, culturally tied up. It's not just
like this is what we considered to be beautiful. It's
very complex exactly. But the fact that we've seen things
like piercings and tattoos become more more accepted in a
(35:41):
Western culture over the last I mean even in my lifetime,
I've seen that the fact that I have a shaved
head and that is considered to be culturally fine in
in America, that has changed. When I first started doing it,
it was before you saw it pretty frequently, and so
I don't know if guys just were holding onto their
(36:01):
hair more back then, but I frequently encountered people who
had not really talked to anyone who had ever shaved
their head. It was it was really an unusual experience
for them. So I had a lot of people asking
if they could touch my head. Thankfully, that part of
my life is behind me, I guess, because now we've
hit a kind of u uh, you know, saturation point
of bald guys, particularly the bald guys would goatee Heisenberg appearance.
(36:26):
So at any rate, we've seen changes like changes and
ideas of beauty and modification happened over the past. So
I don't think that we will necessarily see a future
where this sort of thing isn't embraced, and perhaps at
first it'll be a very niche cultural kind of thing.
(36:47):
But I don't necessarily think that we're going to have
uh people avoiding it forever either. It may be that
humans sixty thousand years into the future look extremely different
because they have modified themselves in numerous ways. I mean,
I can imagine being able to give yourself like electrically
glittery skin or that kind of thing. You know, it's
(37:09):
it's it's definitely in that realm of science fiction, you know,
kind of anime style in a way. But I don't
think it's necessarily beyond believability. I think the prime time
to introduce glittery skin body mods would have been, you know,
five or six years ago, whenever it was Twilight Big.
Really it would have been in the mid nineteen seventies
(37:30):
with David Bowie glam Rock. Okay, either are going to
be really necessary. Way, Well, I want to offer another,
uh concession to what you say, is that we may
adapt to it. I thought also that getting all borged
out could in the future become an example of a
kind of performative consumption. Right, so if it if it
(37:52):
costs money to get cybernetic implants and things like, it's
a status symbol exactly. It could be the future's equivalent
of wearing expense of jewelry and driving flashy sports cars.
You you advertise your financial value by gluing computer parts
to your face and all this. You might even have
people faking it, like they don't actually have cybernetic implants,
(38:12):
they're just sticking stuff on their bodies. So this would
be an intermediary step from the brains and the jars
in my jar is bigger than your jar. Yeah, you're
saying it could be and bigger than. If this were
the case, it's sort of be a question of competition
between the need to show your value and this desire
to fill the natural biophelia. If that, in fact is
(38:34):
is true. You know, I think again, I can totally
understand people saying that this hypothesis rings true, this biophelia hypothesis. Uh, certainly,
there are plenty of examples if we just look at
our fiction of that being true, where you either have
the perfect hero and the disfigured villain, or you have
the disfigured hero who whom everyone treats as a villain
(38:58):
unfairly do simply because of their their appearance. But then
it's revealed that the this person is actually beautiful on
the inside and it becomes you know, an object lesson
for for the reader. Yeah, exactly, so, there there's plenty
of examples just in human experience that support this hypothesis. Obviously,
that's not, you know enough, from a scientific perspective. It's
(39:21):
merely anecdotal, But it's anecdotal supported by at least in
Western culture, hundreds of years of literature and and uh,
and in theater and that sort of thing. Well, and
there are actual scientists debating this. Toime, it's not just
speculations right right now, I'm just saying that, you know,
we can't we don't have the scientific uh you know,
uh consensus on this yet, but there seems to be
(39:43):
quite a bit of support from other parts of the
human experience or you know. The other thing we could
say is that even if it is a deeply rooted,
deeply instinctual genetic predisposition, we have to prefer things that
look living versus things that look ARTIFICI shoal today, maybe
we'll evolve that could be a thing that we change
(40:04):
about ourselves. So at any rate, this has really been
a very interesting discussion. I mean, it's it is something
that's interesting to think about, like what are people going
to look like in the future? Will we And we've
got plenty of examples in science fiction of the idea
of cosmetic surgery gone run amuck, where people have have
taken the what we consider to be uh, either the
(40:26):
ideal or examples of outliers of cosmic surgery today and
then they just multiply that by a hundred so that
we get these truly at least to us outrageous examples
of of modification that who knows, perhaps in uh in
in several thousand years, these things that seemed completely extreme
and ludicrous to us might not seem that way in
(40:48):
the future. It may very well be that these things
that we think are absurd now are just the norm. Yeah. So, ultimately,
when it comes down to what are humans gonna look
like in the future, we have to say we do
not know. There is there is no mean, there's no
way of predicting it because so many different factors are
come into play when it comes to human appearance, and
(41:09):
human preference is one of those, and that changes from
generation to generations or a minute a minute, Yeah, it
just takes me back to college. So anyway, guys, Uh,
I think this was a fun topic. It was not
something that we would normally tackle, right, It was a
little bit outside of it. And but I love that
it's also in that kind of things that are not
(41:31):
always addressed in science fiction realm, and I love that
we're doing these sort of topics. So you guys, if
you enjoy these topics, make sure you get in touch
with us. Let's know what you like. Uh, let's know
if there are any topics specifically that you think we
have to tackle. You know, why is it in science
fiction films you never see X and um, I'm sure
we're gonna get some interesting examples and I can't wait
(41:53):
to read them. So let's know. On Twitter, on Facebook,
or Google Plus. You can find us with the handle
f W Thinking and we will talk to you again
really soon. For more on this topic and the future
of technology, visit Forward Thinking dot Com Problem brought to
(42:21):
you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
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Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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